8 Great Coding kits for your children (or grand children)

"In fifteen years, we’ll be teaching programming just like reading and writing...and wondering why we didn’t do it sooner."

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO, Facebook

As the importance of coding and critical thinking skills are becoming more and more important, we’ve been getting tons of inquiries on how to instill that at an early age while keeping it entertaining for children. While there are many toys out there, a smaller subset of them are both fun and educational𑁋and that’s what I’d like to highlight today.Here are some of my recommendations by age groups, including some of what we offer. I have not included Lego Mindstorms and Little Bits from the list which are already widely known.

12 years and up:

CoDrone ($179.00)

This is our very own CoDrone.It’s the very first educational quadcopter drone you can easily program to do whatever you want: engage in laser battles, go through a maze, and more. Also you have access to all of its curriculum onlinefor free.

9 years and up:

Rokit Smart ($149.78)

This is our very own Rokit Smart. You can make 11 different robots with one kit, and just like CoDrone, you can also get all of the complementary curriculum online. Make Sumo Robot, Line Following Robot, Bug Robot, etc. Erector sets with steroids is what users describe the kit as.

This kit is great for someone who is looking for a good combination of building and programming. Snapping pieces together like lego kits, but you can program it using RobotC or Modkit. Also, there’s competition that happens on a yearly basis as well. If you happen to be in San Diego, we’ve trained a couple champions ourselves in our classes!

6 years and up:

Sam Lab ($139)

Elegant and simple design with a very intuitive drag-and-drop coding environment. Students can play with a light sensor, a buzzer, a tilt sensor, motors. Everything is wirelessly connected through bluetooth, and it’s a great starter kit for coding learners.

This kit consists of well-designed large chunky blocks to create different types of coding sequence. It’s a great starter kit for younger students to get familiar with coding concepts, logic skills and problem solving.

3 years and up:

Cubetto ($225)

The most successful crowdfunded educational kit on Kickstarter, having raised $1.6 million, it’s A simple hands-on Montessori approved kit. You can attach colorful blocks to the programming board to learn algorithms and loops to control this cubic robot. The advantage of the kit is that it doesn’t require any computer or gadgets to learn coding.

Dash, the robot, comes with Blockly apps in order to teach basic drag and drop coding. The friendly design makes coding less scary. Apps are available to make coding the robot easy and accessible for younger kids.

There you have it! We at Robolink encourage parents to expose their children to engineering and coding at an early age, because the job market demand for STEM is ever growing. So get out there, build, and code!